Review: Douglas W. Shadle’s ‘Orchestrating the Nation’

John Knowles Paine, whose First Symphony has been played by the New York Philharmonic only four times since 1876.

CreditMusic Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

By David Allen

Dec. 28, 2015

At its Carnegie Hall premiere in 1893, Antonin Dvorak’s last symphony was hailed as a new dawn for music in the United States. To W. J. Henderson, the critic for The New York Times, it suggested Manifest Destiny in sound. Dvorak had reimagined Native American and African-American tunes as folk music, creating a symphony that “throbs with American feeling,” which voiced “the melancholy of our Western wastes, and predicts their final subjection to the tremendous activity of the most energetic of all peoples.”

Dvorak, although Czech, had succeeded where generations of American composers had failed: He had, Henderson said, “shown us how to build our national school of music.” As Douglas W. Shadle, a musicologist at Vanderbilt University, shows in his absorbing book “Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise,” Henderson could write that only by effacing a century’s worth of local efforts to compose a genuinely American symphony. To see innovation, Henderson (and others) needed to forget.

Subscribers to major orchestras today could go a lifetime without hearing the hundred or so symphonies that Mr. Shadle tabulates were written by 50 or so composers “born or living in” the United States from 1800 to 1900. Americans saw the symphony as a model of republicanism, of the individual’s place in the whole, and believed that it would become “the cornerstone of an authentically national musical culture.” They were enmeshed in a trans-Atlantic culture of musical debate about its form: programmatic or absolute, patriotic or universal, classicist or Wagnerian.

Whose symphonies, though? Americans’ or Europeans’? The question mattered in a century of nationalism; for many, it still does. And even today the answer can be heard at a concert hall near you. As statistics compiled by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra suggest, around a third of music played by contemporary orchestras is Austro-Germanic.

So, as Mr. Shadle asks, “Why do American orchestras play so many German symphonies?” The common response, that German symphonies possess a universal power that American ones don’t, won’t necessarily do. The idea that German symphonies were at once German and not-German — a notion pushed by German musicians who immigrated to the United States in the 19th century — has been an enduring victory for Teutonic cultural power.

Nor was it always the case that the neglected American symphonies deserved their oblivion musically. After all, Brahms’s First was dismissed on its first appearance in New York in 1878, but the First of John Knowles Paine was hailed two years earlier as the fulfillment of America’s destiny as the future home of the symphony. One of those works has been performed hundreds of times by the New York Philharmonic, the other just four times. Both of Paine’s symphonies are as enjoyable as many of the late-Romantic symphonies heard more often.

Mr. Shadle insists that Paine, who led Harvard’s music department, and less prominent composers gained so little purchase because writers, conductors and orchestral musicians “maintained inhospitable attitudes” toward American music “before it had a chance to thrive.” Those in power saw the constant playing of established and not-so-established European composers as the path toward cultural enlightenment.

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Douglas W. ShadleCreditSusan Urmy

So European music of dubious quality was treated with reverence, but critics measured American composers on a forbidding scale. “Beethoven’s is the music of this age,” the influential transcendentalist critic John Sullivan Dwight wrote. Dwight saw Beethoven as fundamentally American, too. “We are all one, though many,” he heard in the notes of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” — “e pluribus unum” as a musical ideal.

Beethoven could not be beaten, in this enduring view. Where, then, did that leave contemporary composers, if their works could even get a hearing? Either to plagiarize or to prove inadequate. Take George Frederick Bristow, whose five symphonies were written over 45 years. Critics advised him to follow Mozart’s path. When the New York Philharmonic rehearsed his First Symphony, he was rejected as not up to Mozart’s genius. As Mr. Shadle notes, critics “never thought to compare his music favorably to works of ‘lesser’ Europeans such as Johann Kalliwoda, whose music the Philharmonic had performed unapologetically.”

Bristow unsurprisingly joined others to campaign against the notion that America must “stand like a beggar, deferentially cap in hand, when she comes to compete with the ability of any dirty German village.” Here he had an ally in William Henry Fry, the musical accomplice of the Young Americans of politics and literature. Fry began as a translator of Bellini’s “Norma” and claimed that his “Leonora” was the first American grand opera upon its 1845 debut. In the 1850s, he insisted that the American composer could declare artistic independence, asking him to “strike out manfully and independently into untrodden realms.” Otherwise, “he can never achieve lasting renown.”

Fry did just that and faced the consequences. His forgotten symphonies evoke landscapes or narratives, dramas like the tone poems of the late Romantics. His “Niagara” (1854) strides into militarism from an opening of majestic mist. More inventive still is “Santa Claus” (1853), a storybook symphony that features a family intoning the Lord’s Prayer and a triumphal statement of the carol “Adeste Fideles.” Fry may have attacked Beethoven’s influence, but certain symphonies of his were unimaginable without the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth.

Mr. Shadle paints these unfamiliar composers with sympathy, if not a biographer’s eye for character. It helps that he has quirky material. Ellsworth C. Phelps’s mostly lost “Emancipation” (1880), for instance, was a vast choral symphony that included a depiction of a slave girl’s dreams of freedom and a funeral march for Abraham Lincoln. Phelps also composed on Native American themes, as did Robert Stoepel, whose popular, provocatively shaped “Hiawatha” (1859) could, when combined with readings of Longfellow’s poem, last three hours.

Other composers were more brazenly political. Anthony Philip Heinrich, for instance, wrote “The Columbiad, Grand American National Chivalrous Symphony” (1837), which quoted “Hail, Columbia,” a tune that the Louisiana Creole Louis Moreau Gottschalk used in his Pan-Americanist symphonies. Gottschalk’s brief “À Montevideo” (1868) blended the Uruguayan national anthem with “Yankee Doodle.”

Dwight and his acolytes scorned such music. “We are sorry to see such circumstances dragged into music as the ‘Indian War Council,’” he wrote, for “music composed with no consciousness of anything in the world but music is sure to tell of greater things than these.” Even Beethoven, though, was hardly perfect in this regard.

Mr. Shadle holds past critics in contempt. In the 19th century, they helped erect nationality as a barrier to greatness. In the 21st, we assail the canon for being too white, too male and too dead. But for a variety of reasons, today’s critics are less powerful. As “Orchestrating the Nation” suggests, only a collective effort, from writers, players and administrators, will suffice.

Orchestrating the Nation

The Nineteenth-Century ­American Symphonic Enterprise

By Douglas W. Shadle

­Illustrated. 330 pages. Oxford University Press. $55.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Quick, Name a Great American Symphony. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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